The Dream of Your PhoneServing as Your Credit Cardt Here’s the thing about mobilewallets: Americans don’t reallyneed them. Plastic cards stillwork, after all; they’re universallyaccepted and almost as easy touse as your phone. That may bewhy, four years after Apple Paydebuted to great fanfare, onlyabout 7 percent of Americans useit, according to eMarketer—andonly about 25 percent of smart-phone users use mobile pay-ments to buy anything. Comparethat with China: 78 percent ofsmartphone users pay by phone,and WeChat and Alipay haveturned sending money into asocial activity. These wildly popu-lar apps are backed, respectively,by tech giants Tencent and Ali-baba. WeChat, with a billionusers, and Alipay, with 500 mil-lion, are runaway success storiesand pure catnip for Apple, Face-book, Square, PayPal, and all thebig banks and smaller startupsplumbing American payments.

p More Loans to Go Around Ten years ago, the fnancial crisis choked off credit for almost everyone–
especially lower-income Americans and business owners deemed too risky by banks and traditional
lenders. But it also ignited efforts to provide more access to credit, and to replace payday loans with
better products—like those created by FS Card, which Marla Blow (below) founded in 2014 after
stints at Capital One and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau. The company’s Build card
charges an APR of about 30 percent—higher than credit cards; far lower than payday loans—
and comes with a chatbot that nudges customers to pay bills early. The company has extended
$50 million of credit to over 100,000 Americans, and is seeing big banks tiptoe back into the arena.

Digital CurrenCy grows up
t There’s an awful lot of froth, fraud, and sheer inanity
surrounding bitcoins, blockchain, and everything cryptocurrency. But there’s also an awful lot of funding and
talent working on new kinds of digital money: In June,
Andreessen Horowitz launched a $300 million crypto-currency-focused fund, and hired its frst-ever female
partner, Kathryn Haun, as its co-lead. Joseph Lubin, who
co-founded the Ethereum platform and founded related
software developer ConsenSys, is now trying to bring
blockchain to industries including journalism and flm
production; and in Washington, D.C., high-profle crypto
startups Coinbase and Circle have helped launch a lobbying group to teach lawmakers all about the industry.

Circle, valued at $3 billion and led by co-founder and
CEO Jeremy Allaire, is a platform that allows users to
buy, trade, and send one another all sorts of money,
from traditional dollars and euros to the newer-minted
bitcoins, ethereum, and U.S. dollar “stablecoins” (don’t
ask). “Money should work the way the rest of the internet
works, for data and content and communications,” says
Allaire, a serial entrepreneur who’s raised $246 million for
his company. “We have open global networks where we
can connect our devices and share information freely and
instantly all around the world, and we want the same
thing for money and economic relationships.” —M.A.

$161 BILLION

What Americans are expected to pay each year,
via point-and-tap smartphone payments, by 2022.

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